Dr. Tommy Wood

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1,133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Tommy Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

And so there he's talking about neuroplasticity, but we kind of got this idea that the brain was essentially fixed as an adult and then couldn't change anymore.

But that can't be true because you still learn and remember things on a daily basis as an adult.

One of the things that I think we've gotten confused about is the fact that the adult brain does not make new neurons in many places, right?

Maybe in the olfactory bulbs, in the dentate gyrus, the hippocampus.

Tiny, tiny number.

Yeah, but like compared to the rest of the brain, you're not really making new cells.

And so because of that, we thought, well, we can't then grow and adapt or change our brains as adults.

But just because we have a relatively fixed number of cells doesn't mean that we can't change the connections between those cells.

And that's happening all the time.

And that is the main principle of neuroplasticity.

I don't know whether it's the majority, you might know whether it's the majority, but I think that there's certainly, it requires both, right?

The either development or strengthening of new connections and then the removal of other connections that decrease accuracy, say, or that don't allow you to do the exact motion that you were intending to do.

This, like I said, kind of goes all the way back to the idea

development of motor skills say in childhood, right?

The brain is kind of finished developing new neurons sometime around two or three years old, right?

Beyond that point, you're actually primarily removing connections in order to refine functions based on the exposures that you have, be they language, motor, social skills, which is what the brain is essentially developing during that time period.

So then

That continues throughout our entire lives.

And I think that something that happens later in life, one of the reasons why we may lose function is because we stop giving the brain inputs to maintain a given function.

Therefore, that pruning continues, right?

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